Jean Craighead George


Jean Carolyn Craighead George was an American writer of more than one hundred books for children and young adults, including the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves and Newbery runner-up My Side of the Mountain. Common themes in George's works are the environment and the natural world. Beside children's fiction, she wrote at least two guides to cooking with wild foods and one autobiography published 30 years before her death, Journey Inward.
For her lifetime contribution as a children's writer she was U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1964.

Biography

Jean Carolyn Craighead was born on July 2, 1919, in Washington DC, raised in a family of naturalists. Her mother, father, brothers, aunts, and uncles were students of nature. On weekends they camped in the woods near Washington, climbed trees to study owls, gathered edible plants, and made fish hooks from twigs. Her first pet was a turkey vulture. George centered her life around writing and nature.
George graduated in 1940 from Pennsylvania State University with degrees in both English and science. In the 1940s she was a member of the White House Press Corps and a reporter for The Washington Post. From 1969 to 1982 she was a writer and editor at Readers Digest. She married John Lothar George in 1944, and they divorced in 1963. Her first novels were written in collaboration with him, and she provided the illustrations for them, done in black and white watercolors or inks. A later editor encouraged her to use other illustrators for her books.
Two of George's novels for children were My Side of the Mountain, a 1960 Newbery Medal runner-up, and its 1990 sequel On the Far Side of the Mountain. In 1991, George became the first winner of the Knickerbocker Award for Juvenile Literature from the School Library Media Section of the New York Library Association, which was presented to her for the "consistent superior quality" of her literary works.
The inspiration for Julie of the Wolves evolved from two specific events during a summer she spent studying wolves and tundra at the Arctic Research Laboratory of Barrow, Alaska. She explained, "One was a small girl walking the vast and lonesome tundra outside of Barrow; the other was a magnificent alpha male wolf, leader of a pack in Denali National Park. They haunted me for a year or more as did the words of one of the scientists at the lab: 'If there ever was any doubt in my mind that a man could live with the wolves, it is gone now. The wolves are truly gentlemen, highly social and affectionate.'" George won the annual Newbery Medal from the American Library Association for Julie, recognizing the year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". She also won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1975 for its German-language edition Julie von den Wölfen, one of only two such double wins.
George was a mother of three and a grandmother. The 2009 Dutton Children's Books Pocket Guide to the Outdoors is credited to "Jean Craighead George; with Twig C. George, John C. George, and T. Luke George". Daughter Twig C. George had previously written a few children's books about animals. Over the years, George kept one hundred and seventy-three pets, not including dogs and cats, in her home in Chappaqua, New York. "Most of these wild animals depart in autumn when the sun changes their behaviour and they feel the urge to migrate or go off alone. While they are with us, however, they become characters in my books, articles, and stories."
Jean died on May 15, 2012 at the age of 92 from complications of congestive heart failure, according to Twig George, at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla.

Works